Two
unrelated incidents occurred last month – one took place in my
neighbourhood, in fact just on the road in front of my apartment
complex, the other took place a few thousand miles away, in our
capital, in fact in the seat of our government – Parliament House.

Some
weeks ago, in Bangalore, we experienced a couple of hours of strong
winds and heavy pre-monsoon showers. The temperature fell
dramatically, much to the relief of all city-dwellers not used to
centigrades in the late 30s! However some other things fell too. Just
on the street that I live two large, healthy flowering trees crashed
to the road, as did two more around the corner. So in all four trees
died just within a 100 metre radius of where I live. In other parts
of the city many other trees were badly damaged. On the same day, a
young colleague of mine, travelling in an auto narrowly missed being
hit by a branch that snapped from the tree trunk! Surprisingly
nothing was written in the local media about the devastation of trees
on account of a brief heavy downpour.

Meanwhile
up north in Delhi there was another storm playing out in Parliament –
over a 63 year old cartoon in a high school textbook. Angry voices
and strong condemnation of a caricature, drowned all reason and
perspective. In an extraordinary show of misplaced solidarity, all
political parties in one voice called for banning cartoons from
textbooks, expressing grave concern over young impressionable minds
being negatively influenced by the parodying of politicians in
cartoons.

So what
parallels can we draw from these two incidents?

The
loss of healthy trees is almost as much of a tragedy as loss of
human lives ! However the absence of discussion and debate on the
possible causes points to a callousness on the part of all of us in
the city. City Corporation officials and workers who are responsible
for the upkeep of the city pavements have in the past few years been
assiduously laying concrete on many pavements right up to the base of
the trunks of trees that still line so many of Bangalore's avenues. (
Of course it's another matter that the condition of our pavements is
appalling) Over the years, the concrete has cut off rain water and
oxygen from permeating down to the roots. This has resulted in the
roots either dying or getting severely weakened. Consequently any big
gust of wind or rain could uproot an apparently sturdy-looking tree.
Once uprooted, the tree is quickly chopped up to clear the road
blocks and the branches and twigs are distributed amongst various
local individuals who may sell the spoils for short-term financial
gains And the city moves on relentlessly till the next scandal or
stir breaks out.

The
'one voice' verdict on our textbooks is not very dissimilar from what
the trees have to contend with. Just as trees have little say in
demanding for their well-being or insisting on city planners and
residents being more ecologically conscious, teachers too are mute
spectators. Nobody has thought of asking the professional in the
classroom – how their adolescent learners respond to the NCERT
textbooks in general and the cartoon in particular. How are
politicians equipped to decide what needs to be taught in school and
how it needs to be taught? Will they soon decide on what needs to be
done if someone has a heart failure or epileptic attack? Will they
also decide how the patient needs to be medicated and monitored? Most
likely not – because the Indian Medical Association and other
doctors' professional networks would have been up in arms about
government interference in professional decisions in the medical
field.

So what
is it about school education and the teaching community in particular
that makes politicians presume that they can take arbitrary
uninformed decisions. How do they know what is appropriate curricular
material for teenagers ? What do they know about how young people
make sense of the world around them especially in today's media-
swamped digitally-connected world? Surely not through textbooks
alone ! If our politicians are genuinely concerned about how Indian
high schoolers view them in particular and politics in general, they
need to do some introspection rather than ban decades-old cartoons.
Their demeanour within the Parliament and outside conveys volumes
about Indian polity. No teacher and textbook that's been muzzled can
ever measure up to this in terms of powerful influence.

Just as
the concrete has undermined the trees on my street and several other
city streets , decades of treating teachers with scant respect, of
systematically stifling their autonomy, disregarding the need to
train and support them both pre-service and in-service, have severely
undermined the foundations of the profession. Admittedly school
teachers were on vacation last month, but none of them have as yet
voiced their concerns over the textbook furore. And once they get
back to school, they will be back to their usual busy routine of
teaching and testing to have time to engage in textbook policy
matters.

One
can't blame the vast majority of teachers when they take cue from
their political 'superiors' and focus on keeping up appearances of
doing their job. Teachers would rather leave the passionate
sloganeering and subversion to the university academics and social
activists. They are more comfortable following orders.

14
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